Tag Archives: artist

French artist Bruno Catalano has created an extraordinary series of eye-catching bronze sculptures called “Les Voyageurs” in Marseilles that depict realistic human workers with large parts of their bodies missing.

I think that the missing parts of the sculptures (their imperfections) make them truly extraordinary and unique.

Giada Semeraro

Marie-Lou Desmeules is an artist who uses pure pigment to transform living models into bizarre sculptures of surreal celebrity lookalikes. Her work refers in particular to plastic surgery which often for some reason or another, didn’t exactly go as anticipated. We can read in her work a veiled complaint to reality television, which imposed this kind of beauty.

Sara Cwynar, is an artist from Canada. She uses images from encyclopedias, biology textbooks, featuring sexy pinups, children, politician-on-TV subject matters, but each gives off an air of american antiquity. Then search the glitch effect she wants by using a scanner; moving the image while that is being scanned, the results are distorted figures. “By mashing up these two technologies, I want to highlight the obsolescence of the old one and the future obsolescence of the new one”. She thinks that the most stylish pictures are the kitchest ones.

Michelle Marshall is a french photographer. During her career she decided to document the incidence of the MC1R gene mutation responsible for red hair and freckles, particularly amongst black/mixed raced individuals of all ages. The gene is recessive, which means both parents need to have it, in order for the child to receive it. Marshall wanted to show the stereotype of the redhead is not representative for all people who enjoy their red strands. Her work is really interesting.

Nancy Davidson creates massive inflatable sculptures that resemble an unbridled body, ballooned and bulging. Combining pop culture kitsch with a feminist spirit and carnivalesque sense of humor, the artist specializes in a visceral language of bellies, bumps and lovely lady lumps, harnessing the bodily force of the human form in a minimalist range of colors and shapes.

Many of the sculptures begin with a weather balloon that the artist blows up with a nozzle. Then she goes to work, squeezing and binding and smushing the round orbs into various bodacious configurations.

For example, “Blue Moon” (below) resembles a belly and butt bursting from a corset trying desperately to restrain them, while another recalls fishnet stockings winding their way up impossibly long legs. Through abstraction, Davidson creates images so physical you may find yourself needing to swallow, as sometimes perusing erotic materials makes one forget to breathe.

After a slew of instagram hate following her body positive imagery depicting women’s body hair went viral, it would have been easy for Seattle based photographer Ashley Armitage to take a step back from her bare-all approach to photography. But this online hate didn’t deter her from portraying a realistic, photoshop free depiction of the female form. Instead of bowing to the trolls, Armitage decided to push the boundaries of beauty standards further, shooting stretch marks, scars, spots and more.

“I create images of the female body because historically these images have been controlled by men. We were always the painted and not the painters. I’m trying to take back what’s ours and explore what it means to have a body that has always been defined by a male hand”– Ashley Armitage

The Gowanus Canal is a Brooklyn waterway that, during the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century and beyond, served as a receptacle of waste for the various companies that fueled the way.

Specifically, the canal served as a dumping ground for coal tar, a thick, black liquid containing benzene, naphthalene, phenols, aniline and a bunch of other hazardous chemical compounds. After it was no longer needed, the canal was left to fester, and the tar substance seeped underground, floated to the surface, and interspersed itself throughout the fetid body of water, yielding a virulent stench and strangely stunning visuals.

Today, the Gowanus Canal is one of the most polluted bodies of water in the country, and was declared a Superfund site in 2010. In 2013, a dolphin even died in its toxic grip.

When photographer Steven Hirsch, a Brooklyn native, saw the channel for the first time in 2010, he was enthralled. During his initial visit, an eruption of oil started bubbling and erupting on the water’s surface with a bizarre cocktail of centuries-old pollutants. Hirsch pulled out his camera and braved the nauseating smell to capture the strange visual effect, like a metallic Impressionist artwork.

The images are at once haunting and oddly hypnotic, illuminating the disastrous results of unchecked contamination left out to rot, and the strange visual complexity that arises from such hazardous destruction. In the images, emerald green, metallic gold and electric aquamarine dance in abstract patterns that seem brewed from the imagination. It’s hard to believe these organic-looking shapes are the result of human waste and carelessness.

“There’s a lot of theories about identity loss nowadays, about how social networks can help you fake your real identity, why do people use photoshop in order to hide imperfections but never use that tool to enhance deficiencies?”

This work could be refered also to how easy is to get plastic surgery to your face like it was made of Play-Doh.

Brno del Zou is an artist and a photographer who uses an interesting fragment style which highlights all parts of a human face. In his “photosculptures” series, Brno Del Zou uses the fragmentation of the body in order to better understand it. The body and the faces are revisited and their volumes are highlighted in order to create installations of multiple scales. These “photosculptures” suggest a clear aesthetic preference which does not hide the chaotic side of our minds.

We’ve seen what a Barbie doll would look like if modeled after the average 19-year-old woman. But when you juxtapose a doll’s facial features with a real woman’s, the results are startling.

That’s what photographer Sheila Pree Bright did in her 2003 series “Plastic Bodies,” which is currently part of the traveling art show “Posing Beauty in African American Culture.” Pree Bright’s work focuses mostly on women of color, exploring their complex relationships to white beauty standards by combining images of real women’s bodies and faces with those of dolls.

“American concepts of the “perfect female body” are clearly exemplified through commercialism, portraying “image as everything” and introducing trends that many spend hundreds of dollars to imitate. It is more common than ever that women are enlarging breasts with silicone, making short hair longer with synthetic hair weaves, covering natural nails with acrylic fill-ins, or perhaps replacing natural eyes with contacts.

Even on magazine covers, graphic artists are airbrushing and manipulating photographs in software programs, making the image of a small waist and clear skin flawless. As a result, the female body becomes a replica of a doll, and the essence of natural beauty in popular American culture is replaced by fantasy.”

One year ago, a New Mexico-based photographer Wes Naman was wrapping Christmas gifts with his assistant and started goofing around with the scotch tape. The artist immediately had an idea that after a year developed into the“Scotch Tape” portrait series, where volunteers put the tape around their faces to create terrifying and just absolutely hilarious expressions. Noses and lips get bent, and Wes also likes to stretch people’s eyebrows to make the eyes pop out – the final results are so bizarre that hardly any retouching is needed!

Two artists have created a portrait series of people who appear to have had cosmetic surgery.

However, the models’ nips and tucks are actually cut-outs from magazines.

Poking fun at the fashion industry, French artists Bruno Metra and Laurence Jeanson stick images of facial features, cut out from fashion magazines, over the models’ eyes, lips and noses to form new facial expressions.

The artists say that the project, called ID, shows how beauty is no longer natural but socially conditioned.

Professional photographer Bruno Metra, 45, said: ‘In the media we are bombarded by images of others.

‘Magazines, cinema and television keep creating and imposing codes that become social references.

‘What one must look like, how to wear make-up, what clothes to wear, how to behave.

Laurence and I are fascinated by the power of the media and how it influences people’s identities.

‘The act of representation has taken over what’s real; models erase themselves in order to gain another self.

‘Here we are portraying identities weakened by the diktat of appearance.’

Shinichi Maruyama exemplifies the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi–the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. In his work, he captures the underlying principle of energetic interactions between forms. The artist first started halting the passage of time through images of suspended liquids forms intending to collide in mid-air. In his series Nudes, Maruyama has more recently collaborated with dancers to create a sense of motion in a single photograph, through layering different frames. In its spatial illusionism and meticulous details, he inevitably points to a vortex of visual forms and sensations, where spontaneity and control stand in perfect balance. The artist’s status lies in his ability to create a new abstract visual language that generates motion and stillness in perpetuum.

The fact that the wounds on these men’s faces are made of candy and ice cream makes them oddly unsettling. Utrecth-based artist, Ashkan Honarvar’s Facesseries seems to beautify what is inherently absent from fatal or horribly disfiguring wounds inflicted by soldiers during war.

Ashkan says his work, “constitutes a search for a universal representation of the evil latent in every human, providing an opportunity for reflection. His aesthetic dissection has an intriguing macabre nature, which opens the images to interpretation.”

“…my work is texture and surface, strongly influenced by the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi. I seek out imperfection, in the insignificant and the overlooked, using a camera to freeze a moment in time, recording marks and surfaces that are in the process of breaking down, ephemeral, in a state of flux. ”

Using a self-designed ceramic 3D printer, extruder, and software system, Steffen Hartwig’s 3D printed pieces are imbued with intentional imperfections, resulting in ambiguous yet alluring artifacts that carry the trace of ceramic’s handcrafted roots. While many advances in ceramic 3D printing today are focused on creating stronger, more technically precise objects than what was previously possible to make by hand, Hartwig’s work stands apart.

To create these kind of ceramics, Hartwig began with parametric design, an algorithmic process used in engineering.

“Aesthetically, I am driven by the beauty and new things that emerge from imperfections, errors or randomness”.

Daniel Martin Dutch artist and illustrator, creates portraits from the sinister glamor and looking ominous. The faces portraits are intentionally damaged after the realization, highlighting a broader concept of beauty, which encloses also the existence imperfection and therefore error.

His brushstrokes aware and at the same time instinctive and spontaneous conquer the spectator, who remains totally enraptured by the sense of chaos and order that emerges from the work of this sensitive artist.

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Fernando Botero is a Colombian figurative artist.His works feature a figurative style, called by some “Boterismo”, which gives them an unmistakable identity.Botero depicts women, men, daily life, historical events and characters, milestones of art, still-life, animals and the natural world in general, with exaggerated and disproportionate volumetry, accompanied by fine details of scathing criticism, irony, humor, and ingenuity.